This is the second installment in ongoing coverage of the 12th Pusan International Film Festival. A preview of the festival can be found here.

As PIFF continues to evolve it becomes decidedly more Asian in focus. This is probably to be expected, though it hasn’t always been that way.  

What has  changed isn’t necessarily the ratio of Korean films to Asian films to, say, European films. What’s changed is who is paying for them. A look back at PIFF 8 or 10 years ago and you will see, for example,  Chinese films funded by French production houses or Korean films funded by German companies.

A look through this year’s catalogue and it becomes clear that the various fundraising projects that PIFF has helped develop over the years  now form the backbone of the festival–the Pusan Promotion Plan, Asian Network of Documentary, winners of previous New Currents Awards at PIFF, and the Busan HD Project are all well represented.

The Chinese film Fujian Blue directed by Weng Shou Ming was the recipient of a new supporting program called the Asian Cinema Fund. The film is Weng’s first and is a gritty depiction of a group of young crooks in Fujian Province.

The film sets up a dichotomy found in  most of the films at PIFF–Asian cultures coming to grips with societies becoming more materialistic and less family-oriented. In the film we see a group of young boys, living on  the Chinese side of the Taiwan Straits  (Fuqing, Pingtan, Changle), standing on the precipice of  new world materialism.

The youths  carry out a  scam; filming and photographing young wives  cheating on their rich husbands who are  abroad working. They blackmail the women and instruct them to put large  sums of American dollars in garbage cans, sometimes paying poor elderly people to retrieve the  dough. One of the boys, fed up with his mother’s own cheating,  convinces the crew to blackmail her.    

That sum  is the foundation of the second story, involving one of the other boys who is trying to move to England. Unlike the other boys he (Dragon) appears to have  a conscience, and returns  to his poor fishing village to say goodbye and drop money off before he leaves China.

As Fujian Blue depicts youths in search of some kind of idealized Western utopia, The Rebirth,  the latest by  Japanese director  Masahiro Kobayashi, shows the other end of the spectrum. The people who made it, and were likewise chewed up and spat out the other side.

Based on a true murder case in Japan the film begins with a man (played by the director), describing the murder of his daughter by her  own classmate in Tokyo. The mother of the murderer is also interviewed, and the two become the focus of the film, which won the top prize at this year’s International Locarno Film Festival.

After the five minute documentary style interviews we’re swept up to Hokkaido,  Sapporo, where both have  (and it’s not explained why or how exactly)  taken refuge at an industrial  plant where the man leads a dreary  laborous lifestyle, while  the woman works in the kitchen of said plant.

Throughout the film, which has no dialogue after the initial  five minutes (and again at the very end) the man is shown working,  going to his apartment, and eating dinners prepared by the mother of the daughter that killed his own. The woman wants the man to forgive her so she can move on with her own life. He refuses.

Hardly a  feel-good film,  The Rebirth will stick with you all night and into the next week. Slowly, by changing the food she serves to the man, he begins to awaken from his  hell.

Like Fujian Blue, the documentary Bingai is a direct result of PIFF-related (Asian Network of Documentary)  funding. This time we’re taken to Hebei Province on the  Yellow River where construction on China’s infamous Three Gorges Dam project is taking place.

Filmed on digital video over 10 years director Feng Yan shows the effect of the government’s relocation programs on families living and working next to the river.

The central figure is Bingai herself, a simple Chinese mother of two who has lived her entire life on the river and is reluctant to move, even as the government officials begin to hound her.

This isn’t just  a heavy-handed plight-of-the-people documentary. Feng puts a face on “the poor in China” and what we’re left with is a proud, intelligent, hard-working woman who has her own reasons for staying in the countryside, just as others have reasons for moving to the city.  

It would be wrong to suggest that films like Bingai and Fujian Blue wouldn’t have been shown at PIFF 12 years ago. But the fact that there are more of them is exciting, and only further props up PIFF as one of the most important film festivals in the world today.